EDITORIAL: "Phasing Out Course Guides"

While in many ways this represents progress -- and could save some trees -- we are skeptical that this will make registration easier. We are not sure the Registrar's Office fully understands the process students go through to select courses. At any given moment now, dozens of students around campus are furiously flipping through registration guides, assembling lists of nine-digit PARIS codes representing their fall schedule. A typical student will be hunched on her dormroom bed an hour past midnight with the books lined out in front of her. She will check her school and major requirements in one book, decide that a particular requirement could be filled next semester, check the class description in the course roster and decide whether it is to her liking. Taking the PARIS guide in hand, she will look up what times the course is offered, and perhaps reject the course this semester because it will conflict with another class, or is only offered at 8:00 a.m., or is during sports practice or rehearsals, or would put one too many classes on that day of her schedule. Amazingly, a section of the course looks like it will work. She puts down the PARIS guide, picks up the course evaluation book and learns that students in last year's class felt "the professor's lectures were incoherent" or that "the teaching assistant was regarded as the worst out of any section" or that "most students expected 'C's." Darn! She tosses the book down on the bed and falls backwards onto the pillow in temporary despair. So close . . . She marks the page in the dog-eared PARIS guide with yet another yellow Post-It note -- just in case -- and starts the process over. Perhaps she calls some friends to see which courses they enjoyed. Perhaps she asks herself "what if I chose this major and this minor?" and works out a mock schedule for the next two years. Perhaps she decides to check with an advisor the next day about one course. Perhaps she is stressing out unnecessarily, or is suffering from information overload -- but time, money and intellectual fulfillment are at stake. Some students have little choice in their schedules or have luck picking courses with coin flips and dartboards. But for many students, it would be nice if computers could bring together the information from all the course guides and could somehow simplify all the "what if?" questions that arise as they try to select good courses with good instructors that fit both their individual schedules and their major requirements. The current course information available on PennInfo takes a step in that direction. It provides course information that is more up-to-date than the information in the PARIS guide, and allows students to call up both course descriptions and course times on the same screen, albeit one at a time. But should this system replace the PARIS guides within five year? That assumes a lot. It assumes that in five years there will be enough public computer terminals to avoid the long registration lines PARIS helped eliminate, and it assumes students select courses during "reasonable hours." Or else it assumes that in five years most students have computers in their rooms, fairly speedy modems, a basic understanding of PennNet and roommates who don't mind the phone being tied up for hours on end. Computers could go a long way to simplifying course registration. But if the campus isn't prepared, "modern technology" could also complicate it. That's not called progress.